"Allies don't help in single combat," Dafyd said. "They're very useful in a war. I don't think my lord the Duke is going to accept a loss."

Rosmund's eyebrows rose toward his hairline. He whistled low, soft and appreciative.

"Insurrection. That would be a very, very stupid thing to do."

"You think I'm wrong then?"

"No," he said. "I think grief drives people mad, and anything, no matter how ill-advised, becomes possible."

"Grief?"

"Look around. The kingdom's caught a fever, and it's touched everyone. Not just you."

A soft wind shook the thick leather walls. The candle flickered and the woman in the next room murmured something inchoate.

"I'm not at issue here. We're talking about civil war," Dafyd said, his voice cool.

"We're talking about mastering a world that's just shown everyone that it will take everything from them anytime it wishes," Rosmund said, his voice growing deep and passionate in a way it rarely did when speaking at the pulpit.

"I don't… " Dafyd began, but Rosmund talked over him.

"Your mother's turned to piety and prayer. Bessin and Palliot have turned to intrigue. I've turned to sex. Back to sex. These are different dressings on the same wound. The plague reminded us that we're powerless, and now we're trying to forget."

"This isn't about the plague," Dafyd said.

"Of course it is."

"It's not!"

Rosmund looked down, lips pressed tight.

"I didn't come here to talk about the plague or God or the wounds of the kingdom," Dafyd said, venom in his voice. "I came because I thought of all the men I know, I could tell my suspicions to you. That you would listen."

They were silent for a moment.

"And didn't I?" Rosmund asked.

A woman's voice came, slushy and warm and dazed.

"Love? Did something happen?"

"Nothing, sweet thing," Rosmund said. "It's nothing. A bad dream."

Dafyd gathered himself to leave, but Rosmund put a hand on his arm. His touch was gentle and familiar, and Dafyd had to force himself not to push it away.

"You weren't like this before the plague," Rosmund said.

"Like what?"

"Angry. Afraid," he said. And then, "You didn't whine as much."

Sleep didn't come easily. In the privacy of his imagination, Dafyd told Rosmund exactly why the priest was an idiot. He dressed down his mother and her overbearing piety. He confronted Lord Bessin and Duke Palliot. His words unanswerable and his logic profound, his opponents abased themselves before him. The rage that kept the Duke from rest didn't cool.

He lay in the darkness of his bed until the quiet murmurs of the guards changed and the first, tentative songs that the birds sang before first light began. He would have said sleep had never come had a rough voice not wakened him.

"The Duchess sent for you. It's here, my lord," the servant said.

The Duke sat up, field bed creaking under him. His eyes felt too large for their sockets, and more than his weight pulled him back toward the bed.

"What's come?"

The pause lasted less than a heartbeat. The answer came with barely hidden awe.

"The blade," the servant said.

A chill mist clung to the ground. The Duchess, wearing a high-collared black dress with a thin silver chain around her neck, stood waiting in the camp's main yard. Beside her, the blacksmith knelt. He looked sick with fatigue; pale skin, bloodshot eyes, and a looseness in his spine that left Dafyd afraid the man would collapse on the spot. Westford's men and allies stood arrayed behind them in an eerie silence. He didn't see Rosmund anywhere. As he walked toward the assembly, it occurred to him exactly how he would look; mist at his ankles, the risen sun shining off his face. It couldn't have been better staged if it had been a theater piece.

With a visible effort, the blacksmith pulled himself straight and held out a sheathed blade.

"Damn near killed us, my lord," he said. "But we got it done."

Dafyd felt a moment's sympathy for the man and his apprentices. The smith had truly done himself damage, and he at least believed it was for the Duke. The Duchess might have smiled, or Dafyd might only have imagined it. He couldn't answer the smith's loyalty to Dafyd's father with rudeness again. The Duchess had known he couldn't.

Dafyd nodded gravely and took the scabbard. There were tears in the smith's eyes. His huge hands shook. Dafyd drew the sword. The best blades sing when they pull free. This one didn't. Dafyd tapped the fresh metal against its scabbard, and it clanked like a metal stick. There was no groove down the center. When he pressed against the flat, it barely flexed at all. The edge was sharp enough, but the blade was ill-balanced and brittle. He had seen boys at play with better.

In deep, stark letters, the smith had engraved God's Will into the blade.

"Westford!" someone cried. "Westford and Honor! Westford and God!"

The men took up the call, pumping their fists and shouting at the morning sun. Dafyd looked at his mystical and blessed blade, hardly better than pot metal. With this he was supposed to win the crown. With this, they wanted him to best Palliot and then most likely lead them into civil war. With this, they wanted him to heal the kingdom. To avenge his father against God. To make all wrong things right.

They might as well have asked him to put his heels against the sky and lift the world.

The first time Dafyd had gone to court, he was just past his seventh birthday. Cyninghalm had been a name to conjure with: the high court, foundation of the kingdom, center of the world. For weeks before, he had dreamed of silvered spires and vast, exotic gardens. The truth was grayer and squat. The great men and women of the court turned out to be much like the people in Westford, but less impressed by his father's status. While grand, and some truly beautiful, no buildings matched the stories he'd conjured about them. Likely nothing could.

This time, he saw graves.

They began five miles from the city walls, the freshest first. Wide fields with headstones like rough, demonic teeth. Turned earth as long as a man or a woman or, more often, a child. With each mile, the graves themselves showed their age by the height of the grass upon them. By the time he saw the rising hill and the city upon it glowing in the afternoon sun, he had left the evidence of the winter's plague behind.

Still, he didn't know how deeply the honor guard of the dead had shaken him until his company passed through the city gates to the flowers and gaudy cloth of the tourney festival. The local folk thronged the streets; they shouted and smiled and sang the praises of God and Westford. He knew they had done the same for Palliot three days before. The new and rightful king had come to Cyninghalm, and only a few people seemed uneasy not to know when precisely it had happened.

Dafyd watched their faces as they passed. Ruddy, laughing, sometimes grinning through tears. The crowds followed him from the city gates, up three hills, to the inner wall, and then to the palace itself. Men and women he didn't know, had never seen, shouting and waving and begging that he should bless them. Dafyd washed through the city on a flood of something that another man at another time might have mistaken for love. Rosmund had known its real name. It might have worn its particolored clothes, but grief was still grief.

The tourney itself had begun a week before; jousts and melees, archery and axe throwing, song and strife and games of honor. A minor knight with third-hand armor stunned the court by beating Sir Laren Esterbrand. Corriot Mander of Evenhall had worn a token from another man's wife into the melee. Sir Ander Anson's lance had shattered in his first tilt on the jousting grounds, and a splinter of it had pierced his leg; the funeral would come tomorrow. Between the ceremonies of welcome and the press of court followers anxious to ingratiate themselves to the Duke of Westford and claimant to the throne, it was after nightfall before Dafyd went hunting Lord Bessin.